


Something to talk about

by wordswehavesaid



Category: Arrow (TV 2012), The Flash (TV 2014)
Genre: But mostly fluff, Can't hide it to save their lives, Fluff, Implied Sexual Content, M/M, Not-So-Secret Relationship, Sort of references "Rogue Air", Tiny bit of Hurt, Vigilantes in Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-14
Updated: 2015-05-14
Packaged: 2018-03-30 11:23:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,942
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3934978
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wordswehavesaid/pseuds/wordswehavesaid
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Because Barry and Oliver cannot stop flirting post-vigilante teamups.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Something to talk about

**Author's Note:**

> So something more fluffy after that last oneshot I posted. Still sorry about that, everybody...hopefully you'll enjoy this one better!

They have _got_ to stop. That’s what Oliver keeps telling himself each trip to Central City, each time someone on his team says, “Called STAR. Barry’s on his way.” Tries to steel himself, remind himself that it’s a fight, a mission, just like any other.

And it works, during the fighting anyway. After that, all bets are off.

He doesn’t know how he always ends up standing a little near Barry once things have settled, no matter how many other people are there as well. The Central vigilante will usually acknowledge the rest of them, particularly if they’ve come in to help with a problem in his city.

But he _always_ turns those mischievous eyes and wide grin on Oliver. And always has something to say.

\---

Little observations, compliments. They can be fairly tame, innocuous even. “That a new bow?” Barry starts with one night after a chase that’s sprawled from Central to Keystone, several armored trucks worth of stolen goods.

“Yes, actually,” he answers, hardly any of the Arrow’s gruff to it. There’s no one here who doesn’t already know his identity, a fact that he’s learned to live with much to his chagrin.

“Nice,” Barry remarks. “Must get better action.”

Oliver smirks, inquires, “Did you become an archery expert since I saw you last?”

“Well I figure you wouldn’t have downgraded,” the other man admits with a shameless shrug.

“Good point.”

“That’s the cops,” Diggle says a few feet down the road. “We got to get going.”

“Right,” Oliver nods to his friend, shoots a look back to Barry. “Meet you at STAR labs?”

The younger man raises his two fingers to his forehead, a jaunty salute. “See you in a bit.” Then is gone in a blur.

“We haven’t teamed up in a month and he knows what your bow looks like. How’s he remember that?” Dig asks.

Oliver just slings it across his back and gets on his bike.

He doesn’t tell him he’s seen Barry far more recently than a month ago.

\---

If he changes one tiny detail about anything, it seems, Barry will notice. And say something about it, openly. Nothing is off limits. His hair, his outfit, which boot he carries a knife in.

Laurel is within earshot, cuffing unconscious gangsters to a chain-link fence, and gives a cough to hide a startled laugh one time the speedster observes with a pleasantly surprised note to his tone, “You shaved.”

Oliver’s teasing reply of, “Some of us have to,” doesn’t just shock Barry. Laurel doesn’t laugh again, however, just looks at him incredulously as the younger man starts to grin.

Their teams aren’t made up of idiots. They’re going to start suspecting something’s up, and soon, if they don’t reign themselves in.

And he could just not say anything back, the thought has occurred to him. But Oliver’s never been one to back down from a challenge.

\---

He’s more than glad they’re on their own one night when Barry gets a puzzled look to his face instead of some kind of smile for once and asks with a cautious sniff to the air, “Is that a different cologne?”

“Gift from Thea, for a dinner with her club’s investors I had to duck out of,” he explains, picking up on the instant relief the man’s expression takes on, visible even beneath the mask. Oliver smirks. “Just business, Barry.”

“Right,” the younger man says with a single nod. “I knew that.”

“Really?” He says in blatant disbelief, takes a step closer to the other, crowding just a little into his space. “Because it sounded like you were thinking something else.”

Barry’s eyes flit from side to side almost faster than he can catch. A nervous smile comes to his lips even as he crosses his arms defensively. “I- I wasn’t. Just, um, wasn’t sure why the change.”

“I see.” Another step, much closer. “Then how about you tell me, Barry...do you like it?”

It’s obscured by the Flash suit, but he knows Barry swallows heavily. Then draws in a breath. Oliver won’t get his answer tonight, however, as a Caitlin’s voice, muffled but still audible due to his proximity, comes through the younger man’s com.

“ _Barry, what’s happening? You said you guys were heading back, but your heartrate and blood pressure just increased._ ”

Barry’s not at all smug or playful now. His cheeks look to be trying to match color with his suit, and he turns to the side with a hand up to activate his end of the connection. “Yeah, no, um, everything’s cool.”

No, it’s really not. Despite the lack of any physical observers, Oliver’s been way too lax to forget the very present Caitlin and Cisco monitoring practically everything except what’s being said around Barry.

He’s supposed to be the careful one. This is clearly getting much worse.

\---

Barry’s back to his incorrigible self the next time he stops into the foundry. Just a visit, no emergency. Oliver offers to train with him. “No, no, don’t want to mess with your schedule,” the other vigilante says breezily, with a grin that turns roguish. “It is salmon ladder day, right?”

The sprawl of him in one of the wheeled chairs and the added eyebrow waggle don’t go unnoticed by Felicity, who looks between the two of them contemplatively.

“I’ll make time,” he states in response, then grips Barry by the upper arm and practically drags him out of the Verdant’s basement.

“Woah, Oliver!”

Barry keeps trying to get him to say what that was all about, but he remains resolutely silent until they reach the warehouse they use for their…encounters. Spars or otherwise. Then he says, “You need to quit it.”

“Quit what?” Barry asks, more than a little irked, as he rubs at his arm. Like it’s still sore with that super-speed healing.

“You know what I’m talking about,” he disputes. “The _looks_ , the- the things you say—”

“You do know there’s a word for that, right?” Barry checks in clear amusement. “It’s called flirting.”

“Not in front of our teams, it’s not. We both agreed—”

“They’re not going to find out. At least not about us actually, you know,” Barry’s suddenly the one who can’t remember the words for things as he scuffs a shoe. “Pretty sure Felicity’s thought I’m in love with you since I found out you were the Vigilante. So that’s, you know, whatever.”

“We both agreed,” Oliver starts again, a bit calmer, “that it would be too complicated.” Having two past failed relationships for teammates already, he knows firsthand how complicated it can get. It never seems to stop him from making the same mistake.

“I know,” the younger man says, scrubbing a hand over his face. “But you know what, Oliver? _You_ started it. ‘Nice mask’ ringing any bells?”

He opens, then closes his mouth. Presses his lips firmly together for a long moment. “Maybe I did,” he admits, somewhat humbled. “But that _was_ before.” Somewhat being the key word.

“Yeah, well, to everybody else, it’s still ‘before’,” Barry replies, the slightest waver in his voice and a couple rapid blinks taking most of the harshness out of his tone. “And I’m getting kind of tired of pretending it.”

“Barry—” There’s not much use when the fastest man alive doesn’t want to listen. He’s long gone before Oliver can even finish the first syllable.

\---

Whether he’s tired of it or not, Barry is _very_ good at pretending, even to Oliver. Over the next couple weeks he doesn’t text or call him to relay random little anecdotes from his day or to check in with things in Starling, like he had been. Communications between their two teams gets cut down to the more public line between Felicity and the STAR labs crew.

When Oliver does see him, Barry’s not exactly cold, but his more professional air comes off _wrong_. To everybody.

Ray braves it enough to tentatively inquire, “Everything alright?”

“Yep. Peachy,” the younger man returns, flat. Then he hauls the metahuman they’d subdued to his feet and in the next second both are gone.

Dig looks at him, pointedly. And so is Laurel. And, once he looks between them and Oliver, so is Ray, though with a bit of confusion thrown in the mix. Like they’re all expecting him, wanting him, to do something about it.

Oh what the hell?

\---

He doesn’t get the chance till the next time there’s a reason for their teams to work together. In that time, he’s had a lot of opportunity to reflect on what he wants to say and how he wants to explain himself and his change of heart.

Oliver chases a weapons dealer down an alley, fires an arrow through his leg that brings him down. One hit has the man knocked out. But his ears pick up a second grunt and thud behind him. He whirls around.

One of the prospective buyers is unconscious on the ground, handgun kicked a few feet away, and Barry is shaking out his fist.

“Nice work,” he compliments. Open, warm, with a grin.

Barry looks at him and there’s the start of a smile there—absolutely beautiful, how could he have gone so long without it?—before the other man seems to catch himself. “Thanks,” he says, clipped, neutral.

Oliver just can’t take it anymore.

Whatever mental script he had goes out the window, and he pushes Barry back against the alley wall with one hand while re-slinging the bow, then closes in on the younger man’s mouth. Barry, thankfully, yields to it with greedy lips and grasping hands, the act unquestionably broken.

Until those hands are pressing him back instead of closer and his fellow vigilante is panting, “Oliver, what’re you doing?”

He rubs a thumb over the other’s cheek, about the only bit of skin available in the suit—nice as the mask is, it’s times like these that he wants to rip it back from the scientist’s head—and tells him, “Finishing what I started.”

“But the others.” It’s a defeated sounding reminder. He caused that. A bigger mistake than all the others.

“I don’t care,” Oliver growls, and surges forward again. And for once, Barry’s happy to make no further comment.

\---

It turns out there was little for him to be so worked up about in the end. They hadn’t been careful, before or after, at all really, and almost no one is surprised.

Caitlin perhaps puts it best when she remarks, “Ronnie asked me about the two of you after the first time he fought together with you. He was _convinced_ something was already going on.”

Now, he looks forward to any excuse to work with the team from Central, and especially just its singular field member. One night he’s in town tracking down one of Zytle’s former distributors trying to branch out, but Felicity relays some information about a fight going down between the Flash and an armed robbery crew.

He zip lines in, kicking at one of the criminals on the way down and nocking an arrow at another once he’s reached the ground floor. The rest of it’s short, quick work, leaving the two of them standing, alone, in the building.

“Nice of you to drop in,” Barry calls as he picks his way over.

“Thought you could use a hand,” he replies mildly, even as he closes most of the remaining distance.

Barry inclines his head, like he’s thinking about it. “Maybe later,” he decides, the promise of _more_ dancing in his eyes. His lascivious smirk turns to a smile, bright and wide, when Oliver laughs.

He never wants it to stop.

**Author's Note:**

> Yeah, so I realize there was a bit of a fight in it, but it ended happy! I'm going to work on some more one-shot ideas for a bit, so those ought to be getting out to you guys in time. Thanks for reading, and let me know your thoughts!


End file.
